Legacy techniques for upgrading a software application to a new version have traditionally been accomplished by overwriting the old software module (e.g., prior version of code) with a new software module (e.g., new version of code). Other legacy techniques have included steps to capture the configuration parameters corresponding to the old application and applying those parameters to the new software module. Various techniques for applying those parameters to the new software module have been employed, for example, storing the configuration parameter in a file, and pointing the new software module to the configuration parameter file. Other techniques have applied the configuration parameters to the new software module by patching the configuration parameters into the new software module. Such techniques have become deficient with the advent of middleware. For example, middleware might be used as a services platform that is common to a large set of applications, and some portion of the middleware might be tuned or configured to handle particular application services in a particular manner depending on the application. Thus, an upgrade by merely replacing an old application software module with a new application software module might not take into account configuration changes made to the middleware in order to tune or configure the services as intended to be used by the new application software module.
Worse, at least since the advent of middleware, it becomes apparent that in the context of typical application installations, there are many more and frequent configuration state changes than there are application code module upgrades. The lifecycle of an application software module in an installation might be reasonably expressed in months, yet the configuration parameters in that same installation might be reasonably expressed in years. The foregoing observations, coupled with the cost of performing upgrades motivates the need for performing upgrades of an installation where upgrades of the software application modules in an installation can be performed independently from upgrades or changes of the configuration parameters (e.g., software application configuration parameters or middleware configuration changes).
The aforementioned technologies do not have the capabilities to perform synchronizing between middleware configurations and application configurations, and the aforementioned technologies do not address synchronizing between middleware configurations and application configurations in the context of an installation-wide upgrade (e.g., involving multiple applications to be concurrently upgraded). Therefore, there is a need for an improved approach.